Editor’s note: Joan Hornig’s Philanthropy Is Beautiful® jewelry line has raised more than half a million dollars for causes around the world by donating 100% of the company’s profits to charities of the purchaser’s choice. What started six years ago as a personal passion to design jewelry for herself has now helped more than 500 worthy initiatives. Joan credits much of her success to a grassroots approach led by women and their persistence and power to pay it forward.

The day I got accepted into Harvard College, I was convinced that my life would be changed dramatically for the better. I believed that fortune, if not fame, was attainable through education and the diploma I would earn. Clearly, I was among the lucky. I promised myself that if my life turned out as I anticipated, by the time I was 50 years old, I was going to find a way to give back everything I made going forward so that others could benefit as I had. I just didn’t know how I would do it. At the time, I also didn’t know that going from a 20-year-old to a 50-year-old would happen so quickly!

Before I knew it, I had been working on Wall Street for more than 20 successful years and making a profitable living. I had everything and more: a husband who loved me, two daughters, an MBA, great mentors and a platform to travel and to get involved in events to support nonprofit organizations. It wasn’t hard to write checks, but I felt that I was not truly living out my dreams of really giving back to those in need. That "give-back-100% mission" was very much in the back of my mind at all these money-raising extravaganzas, but it was only a tangent in my life. I wanted more, but how?

When September 11 happened, it caused me to reconsider my priorities. I no longer cared about having the best; I wanted to be the best I could be. I wanted to be more in control of my time, spend more time with my children and be as passionate about making a difference as I had been about succeeding in business. My competitive nature hadn’t changed; only the times had. I left Wall Street and started my own consulting business from home so that I could spend more quality time with my two daughters and husband. It was being at home that lent itself to more "me" time and I was able to focus on the things I really enjoyed in life.                   

My younger daughter Jessie and I enjoyed beading together. Since I had always enjoyed the art of jewelry making, I found it rewarding to create something of beauty with my daughter. I started designing pieces for myself. People I didn’t know would stop and ask where I bought them. I was flattered. When friends offered to buy them from me, I said I didn’t need the money, but they could make a donation to something that mattered to them instead. One afternoon, while I was at the Guggenheim Museum with a friend, she said, "I love your necklace." When I told her I made it myself, she was shocked and responded, "I thought you were a Wall Street type." She didn’t think of me as artsy; she thought of me as a hard-driving financial type. I said, "I’m lots of things, just like you. And I make lots of jewelry." I reminded her that like her, women are many things simultaneously.